Thursday, 6 March 2014

500 Words From Duncan Jepson

500 Words From...is a series of guest
posts from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books.
Here Duncan Jepson explains the background behind Emperors Once More, which is published today.The novel is the first in a Hong Kong-based
crime trilogy featuring Detective Alex Soong.

Duncan Jepson lives in Hong Kong. His first novel was All The Flowers In Shanghai. A founder and former managing editor of the Asia Literary Review, he writes regularly for the New
York Times, Publishing Perspectives and the South China Morning Post.

Emperors Once More
is set in the near future. It’s Hong Kong, 2017.China has bailed out the West, but the West
has defaulted on its debt.On the eve of a crisis summit for world economic
leaders, two Chinese Methodist ministers are killed in an apparently motiveless
execution in Hong Kong’s financial district.

It appears that luck alone makes Detective Alex Soong one of the first
officers at the scene.But is his involvement more than incidental?
Is the crime itself more than a senseless assassination? It seems so: Soong is
contacted by a mysterious figure, and more massacres follow.

With the eyes of the world’s media fixed on Hong
Kong, Soong must race to intercept his tormentor, and thwart a conspiracy born
from one of the bloodiest confrontations of China’s past, which now threatens destruction in the present.

So: 500 words from Duncan Jepson…

It
is known as the century of humiliation, a term that arose in China in the
early 1900s to describe a number of events that started with the First Opium
War in 1839 and was thought to have ended with the Communist Revolution in 1949.
Those years included painful suffering at the hands of imperial powers and
unequal treaties signed requiring China to pay what would now be billions of
Renminbi. But it also involved some self-inflicted injuries such as the Taiping
Rebellion and a general failure to modernise as needed to defend against
foreign powers.

Yet,
it had not ended, following a few productive years, China fell headlong into another
twenty years of madness through the 100 Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward
and the Cultural Revolution. In the 1970s, Chinese people emerged from
isolation to find that after 5000 years of civilisation, the last one hundred
plus years had left them decades behind people in the West, who barely claim half the
history. It seemed an unbelievable situation and the reaction was what some
psychologists call the superiority inferiority complex – bitterness at a lost
rightful place in the world but also doubt in the belief that perhaps it was
deserved at all. For several generations there was a feeling of inferiority, a
terribly heavy burden, to some it became a belief and way of life.

Emperors
Once More is a story about an angry and bitter person from the generation which feels it has been betrayed by history and a young man from the new generation
of modern global Chinese who are as comfortable in Europe or the US as
they are in China. I wanted these generations to clash in an open forum but I also
wanted to create a story that was entertaining and that pushed me as a writer.
One particular story point was the demand by the older generation to return to
better days regardless of the high cost and confused reasoning.

Longing
for the familiar and fear and resistance to change can push people to try to
stem whatever is next and spend vast resources on avoiding confronting the
inevitable. Most wasteful is expense on war and revolution just to force a
return to the past. Chinese history and culture is full of examples of attempts to maintain the past and a belief in the unquestioned respect for that
which once was. To be declared a great classical artist was to have copied
perfectly the masters before, to honour one’s parents was to follow their
instruction, perhaps even forgo one’s own life for them, and at work one would
be commanded without question. So much of the future given up, but not in humble
deference to wisdom, often only in blind eagerness to nothing more than age.

The
main character is hurt deeply by his own and his parents’ past and he transfers
all his anger to reinstating the values and beliefs of something largely best
left to fade into history. But he cannot, and instead must recreate it from
jagged pieces of confused understanding and mistaken belief. Only a person who
wants even more a new and unfamiliar future to succeed can defeat him and the
two figures repeatedly clash as the story develops, each teasing the other that
they are delusional and set to fail.

Another important element was to try to write a story with a
faster pace than my first novel, and to meet the conventions of a crime novel. The level of difficulty was much
more demanding and complex than I had imagined. A crime novel must meet the reader at
pace and then maintain that momentum. I can only hope that I have succeeded in
some way and that there is interest in a sequel as there are other relationships
that I would like to explore in this narrative structure which might not be so
successful shaped into another form.

Emperors Once More is published by Quercus. The hardback should be widely available in Asia, priced in local currencies, and the eBook can be purchased from on-line bookstores, or else here direct from Quercus. Emperors Once Moreiseligible
for the ABB Book of the Lunar Yearin the Year of the
Horse - see the post of Jan 30, 2014 for details. If you want to vote for it,
please do so by posting a comment, or by e-mailing asianbooksblog@gmail.com.